IT agility needs automation and DevOps culture to go together

As IT operators, the one thing you probably most dread is that 1am call or weekend spent troubleshooting a problem which should have never happened in the first place. But that’s not your only worry. Besides service availability, you are constantly challenged to innovate, so your applications team and line of business owners can create new experiences for end users. You want to be part of that innovation cycle and a partner in the business. The question is how?

There is a constant change and transformation of your business with disruption coming not only from external forces (competitors, complimentary solutions, changing customer expectations) but also explosion of new technologies internally within your infrastructure. The only way to break this vicious cycle is by constantly automating. Not just your basic operations like provisioning, but also troubleshooting processes and integrating with rest of the IT lifecycle. The latter requires thinking broadly beyond technology into the culture of your organization, as well as the tools and processes you use across the IT lifecycle.

Source: IDC 2017

To adapt, innovate, be agile and responsive to your end users and line of business, the DevOps culture has proven to provide many benefits. DevOps is about continuous development and continuous integration. The applications and operations team work in tandem, deploy, and learn from successes and failures quickly. This iterative process helps build robust processes while enabling collaboration across silos in your teams. New services can be deployed quickly, for example updating your mobile app if you are bank or retail store. Leading technology and cloud innovators like Google, Amazon, and Facebook successfully deploy services in hours and minutes instead of days and weeks. At the same time, they detect potential failures, scalability or security issues before it impacts large number of users.

Another important learning from the ongoing adoption of DevOps across many mainstream organizations with large scale IT infrastructure deployments, is the automation that goes along with it. Automation enables speed, agility, responsiveness, operational efficiency and ensure high levels of service availability.

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